Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
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Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
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To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?
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It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.
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From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
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The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
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Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.
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A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.
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The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.
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All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
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The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
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When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."
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It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
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Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
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The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.